Master of Healthcare Administration - Degree Details

Core Curriculum:

HCAD 624: Foundations in Health Services Administration & Leadership
An overview of the structure and operation of patient care organizations with a focus on managing cost and quality. Students will learn how to manage relationships among patients, physicians, insurers, employers, and others in the industry.

HCAD 621: Healthcare Policies and Ethics
An overview of policy, regulations, and ethical issues impacting healthcare. Topics include privacy, regulatory compliance, ethical choices in patient care, and healthcare reform. Students will explore healthcare policy and the challenges that arise as the market responds to policy and change.

HCAD 627: Innovation and Trends in Healthcare
Introduces current trends and opportunities throughout the healthcare industry. Topics include the role of information technology, innovative approaches to delivery, and other components that influence patient care.

HCAD 632: Conflict Management in Healthcare Organizations
Examines the underlying sources of conflict in healthcare settings and presents specific theories and techniques of negotiating among and between medical professionals and administration. While collaboration is emphasized, the course also presents tactics for securing essential terms in bargaining and group facilitation skills for building consensus.

HCAD 644: The Healthcare Revenue Cycle and Payment Methodologies
An introduction to healthcare payment methodologies and revenue cycle operations. Students will explore how optimizing the revenue cycle enhances the patient experience and improves financial outcomes. Topics include how policy shapes healthcare payment, introduction to third party payers, history of reimbursement, revenue cycle components and its role in healthcare financing.

HCAD 656: Healthcare Informatics
An introduction to the field of healthcare analytics with emphasis on the application of statistical concepts, procedures, and tools to add value to healthcare leaders in making clinical and management decisions.

HCAD 681: Issues in Marketing Health Services
Discusses and applies the concepts of healthcare planning and marketing to healthcare delivery, assessment of community needs and resource planning in both ambulatory and clinical settings. Includes health services planning and trends, demand for and use of health services, research methods and sources of marketing and planning data.

HCAD 691: Healthcare Strategic Management
Addresses strategy formation, content, implementation, and performance in a variety of healthcare contexts including providers, plans, systems, suppliers, pharmaceuticals, and biotechs.

HCAD 647: Changing Trends in Healthcare Delivery Systems
This course examines trends and the use of technology influencing traditional healthcare delivery systems. Students explore newer financing and cost-sharing models as well as ways to promote entrepreneurship and innovative partnerships.

Healthcare Operations Concentration Requirements:

HCAD 605: Community & Population Health: Transforming the Healthcare System
Healthcare leaders face an ever-increasing need to address the population health needs of the communities they serve. This course examines reasons and responses driving the whole healthcare industry transformation towards population health management and community well-being. Topics include understanding populations, engaging in new partnerships, system responses, and program measurement.

HCAD 687: Advanced Topics in Healthcare Personnel and Interdisciplinary Team Leadership
Focuses on the essential roles of healthcare personnel and interdisciplinary teams within healthcare organizations. Serves as a comprehensive foundation for all aspects of the healthcare workforce including planning, development, and administration.

HCAD 664: Health Information Systems
This course provides an overview of health information systems with an emphasis on case studies of systems utilized in areas of patient care, clinical decision support, disease, artificial intelligence, demographic surveillance, imaging, simulation, and safety and environmental assessment. Legal and ethical issues are also addressed.

Leadership Concentration Requirements:

BUSA 530: Leadership
An overview of how individuals manage and lead themselves and others in business. Topics include theoretical and practical models of leadership, ethical issues of leadership, and forms of influence within groups and corporations. Students will develop and apply a personal leadership framework. First course for entering MBA students.

COMM 631: Leading Organizational Change
This course introduces students to the concept of the learning organization, equipping them with skills to create educational strategies for organizational change, and preparing them to reflect ethically on the implications of organizational change.

HCAD 601: Self-Reflection in Healthcare Leadership
Assists students in understanding personal leadership styles including personality type and communication style. Exposes students to literature on emotional intelligence and interpersonal neurobiology as it relates to healthcare leadership. Students will reflect upon how their Christian identity may influence the healthcare system to promote social justice, equity, and ethical policy.

General Concentration Requirements:

Choose any three courses listed in the Healthcare Operations or Leadership Track requirements.